Posted
by
kdawson
on Thursday December 14, 2006 @12:07PM
from the fast-and-flashy dept.

Iddo Genuth writes "After unveiling their upcoming hybrid hard drive, Samsung — along with a number of other manufacturers — is planning to begin shipping solid-state drives during 2007. Unlike the upcoming hybrids, solid-state drives should work with windows XP as well as Vista." The drives will be introduced in 1.8- and 2.5-inch form factors for notebooks. While streaming performance can't equal that of hard disks, Samsung claims that random-access performance is more important and that (e.g.) Vista users would see a 4x speedup in many key operations. Pricing was not announced.

Now this is one configuration where this drive will make a large difference in bootup speeds. Office apps, audio, video and other media should be happy on the old 7200 rpm drives for a few years still.

No, this drive will be worse for boot up time. Boot time is a function of how fast info can be pulled off the drive, and this thing is modestly slower than hard drives. But its latency is terribly faster and will increase responsiveness whenever information scattered at different points is rapidly needed, since it takes no time to move a physicial arm between memory locations.

OS bootup time depends largely on the time required to find and load all the dynamically linked libraries and the various tools, programs and daemons that are scattered around the hard disk, so access time is a very important factor.

11 seconds to boot up? In what world do you live? My mac takes around 30 seconds before being functionnal and my windows 1m30 at least... Linux is around that figures too. No, I won't use VxWorks or QNX as a desktop. Good for you if you do, but I'd like to know how you achieve such performance with conventional desktop OS.

Coming out of hibernation (S4) seems almost slower to me than a regular boot. (Hibernation being where the machine writes all the information from RAM to the hard-drive and then completely shuts down.) Hibernation is certainly less reliable than a regular reboot... at least in my experience with my Workstation PC. (i.e. The proprietary NVidia Linux module doesn't come back out of hibernation properly.)Coming back out of "Suspend to RAM" (S3) on the other hand... is virtually instantaneous. And it works

Could someone tell me why one type of drive wouldn't work with a specific version of Windows? Shouldn't they be able to write drivers for that?

I am guessing that a better description of the problem would be "not optimized for Windows". A hybrid drive is best used when small, in-demand data chunks are put on the flash components and large or infrequently accessed files are left on the platters. Perhaps there is no reasonable method to decide what files should go where?

Solid-state drives are flash drives with a PATA/SATA connector, and will work like a regular hard disk, as far as the motherboard and the OS are concerned. Therefore working whatever OS you're using.

Hybrid drives, OTOH, are relying on two different technologies, and it seems the choice of using disk or flash is up to the OS. It means that if your OS isn't Hybrid-drive aware, you probably will end up with using the disk and losing its flash ability. Vista OTOH will be able to put some files on the flash part.

Could someone tell me why one type of drive wouldn't work with a specific version of Windows? Shouldn't they be able to write drivers for that?

As others have pointed out, they are standard connectors and would work with any OS basically.

Why 'Vista' is singled out, is Vista will recognize that it is a solid state drive, and use a 'different' set of cache and pre-cache techniques to get even more performance out of it than a regular OS would, by utilizing the drives random r/w speed over conventional HDs.

According to Microsoft, "SuperFetch understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive".

Seems nice in theory, but the first thing I do to any XP machine that someone tells me is running very slow is to kill those quick start apps in the bottom right corner. Their use of processor and/or memory definitely slows the machine down overall. I'd much rather wait an extra second for an app to load so the system runs faster overall.

So they better have improved their techniques with this SuperFetch. If it causes many more context switches or reduces memory available to apps people are actually running then it'll be a hinderance. At the very least it should be automatically turned off for systems with less than an ideal amount of memory.

If it's done right, then it'll be handy. IIRC, linux uses free pages of memory for disk cache, and if an application needs more pages, it just invalidates the disk cache pages, and allocates them to the app.

If Windows caches applications into free memory pages during disk idle times, it'd probably make a huge difference, so long as it doesn't take memory away from the currently actively running applications.

I saw this "SuperFetch" idea and it is a total rip off of NeXT's "prebinding" system. Often, when you install something on Mac OS X (since version 10.0), there is a little status message in the installer that says "Optimizing System Performance...". This command calls a program that sits in "/usr/bin" that loads memory addresses of each program in a cache for faster launch times. After prebinding, applications load faster at startup.

There is also a daemon on Mac OS X that dynamically prebinds applications that have not been prebound. One condition of prebinding is that all the Libraries must be dynamically linked and prebound themselves. If one dependant library is not prebound, then the whole thing gets marked as something "not to prebind."

To see the actual programs on Mac OS X, do a
ls/usr/bin | grep prebinding

According to Microsoft, "SuperFetch understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive".
It's Microsoft, remember? They'll use superfetch to optimise Office and IE7 and a few OS functions.

Then they'll start making a big deal about Firefox and OOo being slower.

You don't really seem to know what you're talking about (although I suppose that doesn't prohibit anyone from being "5, insightful" on/.). They can't "improve their techniques," because there was no version of this feature in XP.

Those "quick start apps" you mention have nothing to do with XP, and everything to do with application writers who think you want their garbage running all the time. Those aren't just "pre-loaded" into memor

Amazing that this kind of stuff gets touted as innovative new features. I have in the past put together a shell script of a few lines which pre-loads commonly open files at boot time. It's trivial and shows just how inflexible Windows really is.

What I want is a system where I can designate what gets accelerated. 90% of what I use commonly is small programs that only take a second or two to load up anyways. It is the big stuff that I may not use every day that I want to be able to designate.

That's why I am more interested in the solid state and RAM drives that I have been seeing than in the hybrids. Those let me install what I want to them. Everything else can go on a traditional drive.

Doesn't flash memory have a maximum lifetime (R/W cycles)? If so, are these new drives designed to "degrade" gracefully so that as the flash "rots", more and more data is stored to the drive instead of the memory? If so, this would mean that the drives would "slow down" over time right?

TFA states that current flash technology has a lifespan of about 10 years. Unlike hard drives, when flash fails you can still read from it, just not write to it. This means that, when your drive wears out, you just dump the contents to the new one, which is much larger anyway. You don't lose data.

Off topic, when did 32MB/s write speeds become slow? My new laptop gets about 30MB/s sustained (linear) write speeds, and I thought that was pretty impressive.

Flash has a maximum number of *write* cycles. Not read/write cycles. The trick is to only store the data that does not change readily (hah, or should that be "writely"?), which I think was what MS had in mind. Of course, using the hdd as backup and a checksum over the sectors would be a good idea none-the-less, if only as protection against malicious programs re-writing the entire contents of the drive until it fails. A bit of paranoia is needed if you consider security.

I remember it being in the 1980's, and there were two primary vendors: Memorex and a little startup called Intel.

The solid state paging devices were great; the only problem was that they needed a driver written by (if I remember correctly) Cambridge University. The driver writers ran 6 months to a year behind operating system releases, so our operating system upgrades (VM/CMS) were held back. The vendors didn't care; they were the only game in town.

The greatest immediate benefit from the transition to solid state storage will, of course, be reduced power consumption.

Coupled will fuel cell technology, mobile computing is finally going to live up to its potential.

And I love this William Gibson quote from 1991:

It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside- this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.

Because he seems pretty darn techno savvy in his books. I can't believe he makes it all up and it just happens to be derived from technology that already exists by pure coincidence. I'm sure he's a lot more clued up than he lets on.

I weakest link will become the battery. Even after switching to OLED for displays and to solid state drives, the CPUs and the video cards will drain more and more power because they'll have to run behemoths like Vista on the machine. So unless there is a dramatic improvement in the basic processor design or battery technology (fuel cells?) mobile computing won't quite live up to it potential yet.

That would be a good point were it not for the fact that in addition to the advances being made in storage, display, power, and all related technologies, there is a parallel evolution going on in the realm of software platforms. Microsoft may have a huge chunk of the market right now, but as even they realize, the OS as such is becoming increasingly relevant as the Internet becomes a full-fledged platform in its own right.

...because they don't want you to get a bad case of sticker shock. If texas memory systems (http://www.texmemsys.com/) is any guide, these things won't be comparable to platter drives in cost per GB per performance. Maybe they've figured out a way to manufacture the things not too expensively per GB but the performance will be wretched. And even though most apps will not care unless you have a stopwatch people will look at the raw numbers and shy away. Just see all the trouble AMD had with the Pentium 4 vs Athlon XP CPU GHz wars.

Well, I checked price now for a 16GB USB stick, 150 NOK/GB and it's almost constant from 2-16GB. HDDs is around 2.3 NOK/GB at the sweet spot. That's a guesstimated 65x price difference. I doubt they're that far ahead of the curve or they'd make a killing in the stick/memory card business. Also note that most of the advantages are only for laptops "on the go" like power reduction and shock/vibration resistance. Cool? Yes. But definately a high show-off factor, doubt it means much for real work.

I did an eval of SSD back, oh five years ago for my employer. These were SSD's attached via SCSI to Sun boxes running Solaris and Sybase. Based on the results I saw then, I have two problems with this:

>Vista users would see a 4x speedup in many key operations.Back in the day, we were seeing 10-20X improvements over spinning media in Random Access. 4x is almost not worth it, depending on price - give spinning media another year or two and they'll match that gain.

>Pricing was not announced.Of course not, because it's going to be outrageously expensive!

I would not know about that. 5 years ago, a fast drive would do a seek in about 12 ms. Now it is 9 ms. That's not impressive. Density and streaming speed has increased manyfold within that time frame. Seek time has not. And it'll be some time before the random access speed of flash is met by spinning disks (and more importantly maybe, the drive heads). Especially if you read the article carefully, and see that the 4x speed up mentioned is the overall speed speedup.From the faq:

"Just add more ram to your email server, and the size of the disk cache should increase automatically:P"

Yeah, well, some people don't want to loose the mail after retrieving it from the SMTP server. Then again, you would need to put the flash replacement drive in a RAID configuration as well to be completely sure. Besides that, you would need a 64-bit CPU and application to use more than 2 GB of RAM for some systems. But that's probably why the ":P" is there.

My notebook only has room for *one* drive onboard. I'm not going
to replace a 80gb hardrive for a 4gb ssd (which currently cost
$465 (see http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html/ [dvnation.com]).
So the hybrid is the way to go... but what I'd like to see is a
hybrid that just shows up as two drives under non-vista operating
systems. Then the boot stuff could go on the small flash drive and everything
else on the old fashioned (big) hard drive.

Maybe in future versions, the flash will be part of the design of the laptop. I'm pretty sure it will. The only reason to put flash on an IDE interface, PATA or SATA is to accomodate for older laptops. If the BIOS support starting from flash, there is absolutely no reason to put an expensive and sluggish interface in between.Before you get one of those laptops, put your OS, applications and documents on the flash, and all the media on a 1.8" or 2.5" HDD drive on a (well-powered) USB port. If you use develop

Wouldn't a better focus be on battery backed up RAM drives instead? Like those PCI DDR ram drives that cost a bundle. It would be nice to get a blazing fast PC3200 1GB RAM-Drive for $100.. which would be multiple times faster than these drives.

For servers and desktop, maybe... But for laptops it is impractical given the restrictions of keeping it powered.

Seems to me that you could do RAM+flash; have it work as a RAM drive when "powered on", but then when powered off (either with the whole system, or by power management powering the drive down due to inactivity) it dumps the RAM to the flash, and restores the RAM from flash when powering up. You get better performance, and save rea

You can't install your OS to system RAM. Its also not easy to automatically have all documents or programs or whatever always loaded into RAM. Not to mention the limits on total physical ram (especially in the Windows world). If I could get an 8GB Ram drive for $400 I would probably do it. 3GB/s transfer rates blow any other currnet storage medium out of the water.Now compare the price of a motherboard + Operating system + 8GB additional RAM(for windows users mostly) and you see how efficient adding more RA

It would seem to me that these drives if they were used might be present an issue with data security. Are there any plans to protect the solid state components from being read by unauthorized access? Hopefully the design is such that all data is protected but being new, I couldn't get enough details to make a determination.

This is one of those interim solutions for early adopters who have more disposable income than capacity for delayed gratification.Here's an "Ask Slashdot" moment though: why do the heads need to move at all? Why isn't WD or Samsung or Hitachi building a long, length-of-radius head over each platter? Then the only motor needed is for the platter, and the head is merely a fixed unit? This would probably reduce most HDD crashes too, since the arm would no longer traverse the drive plane.

This would make an ideal drive for streaming media servers and small databases, which is exactly what I currently need. Streaming media requires a lot of sustained reads from different locations, which taxes the ability of a drive head to cover. With 1ms access time, a single drive could replace a RAID configuration, saving power and space in our 1U boxes. Woot!

Since flash does have a limited number of writes, using one of these in a PC for daily use would be limited at best, so I'm wondering what types of applications would this media be ideal for?The only answer that I could think of is anything that is 'write once, read many times'.Movies - build a huge RAID array of flash drives an let them go to town on the lastest blockbuster.TV - PPV system / VOD. New shows come on their own stack, plug them into the PPV system and be done with it.Databases - certain table

Unless I'm missing some huge hidden folder, that means a 16GB drive would be plenty for most users as the OS+applications drive, unless (since I said "most users") Windows XP or Vista have become so bloated that they can't fit it all in even 16GB.

I could hold my whole XP image on 10.4GB. Anything that's not on the image is on the corporate network somewhere such as Notes servers. So if someone would build a laptop with a 16GB fast SSD then that would be great. I'll even buy my own portable USB harddrive for everything that doesn't fit. For home use I already have a NAS.

If these drives become standard they'll have a huge impact on my day-to-day.

The most common point of failure in a desktop PC is the drive head smacking into the disk platter in a rotational-magnetic drive. The worst part of these failures is that your drive head runs a real good chance of being over your important data when it hits (because you access it often, because it's important), so you're much more likely to toast your critical ACT! database instead of the rarely used Typing Tutor Turbo III you do

While I wouldn't doubt we see more devices in the upcoming years, hard disks definitely have a place, at least on home computers. I imagine it's rare that anyone with a full 100GB+ HDD has only programs and application data. Giant media files are commonplace, and reading/writing large files is the primary drawback of SSD, and something platter hard drives do very well and very cheaply.

I think what we'll probably see is computers starting to come standard with an "applications" ssd and a "media" hdd.

No, I don't think you want. For streaming reading from a disk is faster. If your video is stored continuously on disk then a spinning platter can transmit the data faster. Flash can be faster for random reads.

And if anyone had actually read the article, they would see that according to Samsung, the Flash technology in use in the drives has a lifetime of TEN years (your IDE / SATA HD likely wont last that long btw). They also note how much the R/W cycle issue has improved in the last few years.

Oh wait, this is/., we don't read the articles we just write silly comments first!

I call BS. You are still using all your 1gb hard drives from 1996? Or do you mean that they 'lasted ten years' as in, they lasted as long as I wanted them to last before I stopped using them and they are sitting on a shelf somewhere in my basement so I'm sure they work just great.

Whenever I've bought a new computer I've kept the older ones around for servers and "play". Right now my last desktop is a media server with a few old hard drives, together giving me a lot of space. The desktop prior to that is a web server. I never throw out old hardware that's still useful, including 10 year old hard drives.

Strange... the/. story doesn't say anything about it being flash ram. Not sure how you came to the conclusion that I didn't read the article.

Anyways, I know that R/W cycles have improved, but they still aren't at the point of lasting as long as hard drives, especially when portions of them are used for swap space, temporary files, and other virtual memory.

Flash is too restrictive in how many times it can be rewritten to be a viable replacement for a hard disk drive. Nice try though.

Well, there's a nice unqualified anecdotal opinion, it must be proof. On youe average corporate desktop with word and excel and powerpoint and outlook and whatnot the laptop will die long before the HDD. Your average coder's debug files don't make a dent, not even the salesmen's multi-MB powerpoint presentations. Maybe, if the desktop was used for the typical P2P "download, watch,

I've always wondered about this. Most modern flash seems to get 100k writes (many more reads). Fast flash is on the order of 13MB/s write.

With load balancing, you wouldn't notice a failure until all the locations were rewritten just shy of 100,000 times. So the drive will "fail" in once you've written 40GB of data 99,999 times, or almost 4PB of write ops. At 13MB/s, that's just under 10 years of 100% duty cycle writes. If you presume you'll read that data once at 20MB/s, and you allow only an 82% duty cycle overall (to make the math easy), then your drive should last 20 years.

I don't know about you, but I don't have any 20 year old computers or drives. The computer I had 20 years ago (PS/2 model 30, iirc) used 720k floppies, and a 20MB hard drive was a $400 option. Wait, check that. I do have a copy of Windows 1.04 on floppy disk here. It fits on three 720k floppies.

But if you write 32GB - 1 bytes data once and then rewrite that one byte 100000 the flash would fail in just couple hours (if we assume there are no reserved blocks that can be used for remapping bad blocks). Still, if take average of our values, i'd say 4 years is plenty for a laptop hdd. And ofcourse we have backups:)

The usual way they construct it is like this:1. Fill your drive 95%2. Trash the remaining 5%. Your disk will now die in 1/20th of the time, that is a matter of months

IMO even that theoretical problem could be solved by active swapping, that is using some of your write cycles to move information internally. If you spent 100 of your 100k cycles doing that noone would notice. So when you're trying to trash those 5%, those 5% would swap places with the other 95%, even though there's no free space. For all I know maybe they do already, but if it was a problem that is the solution (this was sooo obvious. I bet it's patented).

I've seen this problem happen in practice, with a development embedded system that booted off two flash cards. It ended up lasting 6 to 8 months or so before we needed to put in another flash card (it used CF cards, one 32mb which took all required R/W operations and one 1GB which was RO) and we took images for when the CF cards died. There was no swap, no journaling, and temp files were moved to a ramdisk where possible, but some files needed to be modified during development and the CF cards didn't last.